


the essay that changed Dan Howell's career

by itsmyusualphannie (itsmyusualweeb)



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Teachers, Closeted Character, Established Relationship, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Teacher Dan Howell
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:00:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27110833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/itsmyusualweeb/pseuds/itsmyusualphannie
Summary: Dan is a teacher who is closeted out of a fear of losing his job, but he encounters a teenager he relates to a little too much and struggles with wanting to make the class a safe environment without coming out himself.
Relationships: Dan Howell/Phil Lester
Comments: 5
Kudos: 25
Collections: Phandom Writers Discord 2020 Fall Exchange





	the essay that changed Dan Howell's career

**Author's Note:**

  * For [manchestereyes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/manchestereyes/gifts).



> written for my phandom discord server's fall fic exchange! i hope you like this, i had small one-shot idea for it but it kind of spiralled and now it'll have another chapter or two at least!!

It was almost twilight, but two boys were still at the playground. The last of the other families and children had left an hour ago, and yet they remained behind, chasing each other through towering plastic playhouses, swinging through jungle gyms, and throwing themselves down slides. Eventually, one of the boys grew tired and he dropped to the grass at the edge of the playground, his chest heaving as he caught his breath. His friend was still trying to climb up the slide the wrong way.

“Dan!” called the boy on the slide, losing his progress and slipping back down. His bare feet hit the packed dirt with a _thud_. “Come back and play with me!”

“Don’t feel like it,” said the boy on the ground, but he was watching the other with keen eyes.

“Will you push me on the swing?”

“Don’t feel like it,” Dan repeated.

“Fine.” Grudgingly, the boy pushed himself off the slide and hopped on one foot a few times, then trotted over to Dan and threw himself down next to him. He huffed loudly and then yawned. “Do you want to go home?”

“No.” Dan turned his gaze from his friend to the sky, which was a dark, dimming blue. “I just wanted to take a break.”

“Okay!” Cheerfully accepting that, the other began examining the trees and surrounding shrubbery, probably for animals.

Dan sighed. “Phil, do you ever feel like, I dunno, like you don’t belong?”

His friend glanced at him. “Whaddya mean?”

“Like...ugh. I don’t know how to say it. Like you’re in the wrong place.”

“Like, you should be out somewhere doing something else with your life?” Phil offered.

“I guess. Something like that.”

“Yeah, sometimes I feel like that. Not much. Do you feel like that?”

“Yeah, sometimes,” Dan echoed. He turned his face away from Phil’s curious gaze. “I dunno, it sounds stupid. I just feel...weird.”

Phil didn’t seem to know how to respond, quiet for a long moment, then he said, “Well, it’s okay to feel like that. I mean, you can feel however you want. It doesn’t sound stupid.”

Dan was quiet.

Phil glanced down at Dan’s limp hand hanging between them, and he reached down to take hold of it. Dan’s hand twitched in surprise, then his fingers tightened around Phil’s. “Is it...about this?” Phil asked, a murmur of a question.

“Kind of. Not really. A little.”

It wasn’t an answer, but Phil seemed to decipher it. “I don’t always get it, either,” he said. “It’s not something anyone talks about, but...you’re my best friend. And it doesn’t feel wrong.”

“It doesn’t feel _wrong_ ,” Dan insisted, alive suddenly. He turned toward Phil, his grip tight around Phil’s cool fingers. “I just feel like...like we have to call it something or people will call it something _for_ us and I just...I don’t. I don’t want to.”

“We don’t have to. We’re just best friends.”

“Yeah, I know.” Subsiding, Dan sank back against the grass, the strands prickly against the length of his spine. “I know, it’s just…”

“I get it.” Phil tugged on his hand and grinned at the other boy when that earned him a quick glance. “I can read your mind, remember?”

Dan scoffed and shoved at him ineffectually with his other hand. Phil wasn’t fazed. “We have a brainwave connection!” he announced. “That’s what happens when you’re best friends for five years.”

“Six years,” Dan immediately argued. “Just because we barely talked in Year 3 doesn’t mean we weren’t best friends. Best friends in-the-making.”

“Sure,” Phil laughed.

“But that doesn’t mean you can read my mind.”

“Sure I can.”

“Do it, then. What number am I thinking about?” Dan stared at Phil with a clear challenge in his eyes.

Phil hesitated, then, “Sixty-five!”

“Wrong!” Dan triumphed. “I was thinking of the colour orange.”

The corners of Phil’s mouth slipped down in a petulant pout. “You cheated,” he complained.

“Obviously.”

“Mr Howell?”

Dan’s head lifted at the quiet voice, despite his initial knee-jerk reaction to glance around for his father. He still wasn’t used to the name, despite the six months he’d already been working here. “Yeah, how can I help you?”

The classroom was already half-dark, a few light switches flipped by one of the other students as they strolled from the room, but Dan had remained, hunched over his desk as he hurriedly typed a few notes into the slideshow for the lecture he’d just given. He squinted at the light over the student’s shoulder, straightening entirely after a moment of painful silence.

She was holding a sheaf of papers clutched between her fingers, and despite the intensity of her grip, Dan could see that her hands were shaking. He waited for a moment, hesitant to prod her, and she finally took in a deep breath and thrust the papers toward him.

“It’s my essay,” she said, voice so low it was almost a whisper. She shifted from foot to foot after Dan took it, her gaze dancing to the still-open door. “Um. It wasn’t peer-edited.”

“That’s okay,” Dan said gently. “That was just a bonus part of the assignment.” He flipped open his binder that held the stack of other essays students had turned in at the beginning of the class. He could feel his curiosity peaked, interested to discover what had her so nervous that she couldn’t hand it in with the rest of the class or let anyone else look at it.

He could understand that, though. It was hard to let others see and judge your work. It must be personal to her.

“You said they’ll be graded by Monday?” Her voice was still barely a breath as if she was afraid of another student overhearing them despite the empty classroom.

“Yes, I’ll do them over the weekend.” Dan placed her stapled papers on the top of his little collection and closed the binder, sliding it into his bag. “I’ll have the grades and any personal feedback uploaded on the online portal, so you can look at it whenever you have time.”

She seemed to collapse just a little at that, her face slack with relief, but she stiffened back up when Dan smiled at her. “Uh, thank you!”

“No problem,” he called after her as she hurried from the room. He smiled fondly and began packing up the rest of his items. This was his last class for the day, although it was only three in the afternoon, so he might as well head home.

He was only a few weeks into this semester, still acclimating to the new faces and names, but he liked this class. There was a good mix of quiet and bubbly ones, the students who’d cut in to ask questions and those who never spoke and relied on the ones who would speak up.

The room fell dark and silent behind Dan as he left, hitting the last light switch and swinging the door shut behind him. He waved to another teacher as he headed down the hall, an instinctive gesture that wasn’t returned as the other man seemed to tilt up his nose and turn away.

Well, Dan was much newer than most of the other teachers. He understood if he wasn’t in their clique just yet, but it still stung a little.

His car beeped obnoxiously as he climbed into it in the teacher parking lot behind the building. He had to fight to get the door shut; it was still bent at that weird angle after Phil had somehow run into the only mailbox still standing on their rundown street. They’d paid for the mailbox to be replaced instead of fixing the dent in the car, and Phil was subsequently banned from driving for eternity instead of just forever.

In his defence, Phil had insisted, it had been an emergency; he’d been craving a macchiato. Dan had not been impressed.

Dan’s mind drifted back to the snobby teacher in the hallway as he flicked his blinker and turned onto the main road. He hadn’t even met Dan’s gaze, mouth wrinkled and eyebrows pinched low in an ugly sort of sneer.

And yet, somehow, it hadn’t been a mean expression. Dan wasn’t sure how to decipher it. He wasn’t sure how to figure out a lot of things that had been going on ever since he’d gotten this job.

He’d replaced a temporary teacher, he’d been told, who had been fired for reasons not given to Dan. He’d been given the same classroom that the other teacher had had, though, and he had found a few mementoes still in the desk of the person he’d replaced. A handful of paper clips, a sloppily folded origami swan, and a rainbow sticker still on its backing paper. They felt like some strange sort of insight into the previous teacher’s life at the school.

And a hint, maybe. Dan had repurposed the paper clips and hooked the swan on one of the window blinds where it still sat during his class times, but he’d slipped the little sticker into his pocket and it was on his nightstand at home. He looked at it sometimes when he got up to get ready for work, eyebrows furrowed as he tried to work out something obscure just out of his grasp.

He was still trying to work out that something.

It was nearing dark by the time he was able to get started on the papers. The hours had passed dizzyingly fast at he had graded assignments from the past few days and catching up on any that he hadn’t been able to go over yet. He did it at the little desk cosied into the side of the living room; lamp bright beside him and Phil’s eighth-favourite plant trailing leaves over the folders on the side of the desk.

“What do you want for dinner?” Phil called from the kitchen just as Dan’s fingers closed around the binder containing the submitted essays. Phil had gotten home a few minutes after Dan that afternoon, although it had only been because he’d been grocery shopping.

Phil’s job was mostly done at home, even if he did go to the occasional meeting with the managers of the little company he worked for. He liked to joke that he was a stay-at-home husband, at which Dan would roll his eyes and Phil would laugh his little snort-laugh. He designed video games, and although Dan wasn’t supposed to know the behind-the-scenes of his work, he still sometimes, when he was tired, he crept up behind Phil when he was working at the computer, rested his chin on Phil’s shoulder, and quietly watched Phil click away at confusing threads and functions that didn’t look anything like the eventual finished product of sleek video game design.

Dan flipped open the binder, surveying the top name before tossing, “Something with noodles!” back toward Phil. He took out the essay and his favourite red pen that he used to write corrections and suggestions on the paper. The paper was from the girl earlier. Dan could well remember her anxiety in giving it to him, her shaking hands and shifting eyes.

“Do you want chicken?” came another yell from the kitchen.

“Sure!” Dan replied, but his attention was gone now on the essay. He flipped over the cover page and began to read, drawn into it from the first paragraph.

The assignment had been to discuss a topic close to the students’ hearts. Dan hadn’t specified; he’d wanted passion, he’d told his students, that kind of intense focus that a person would only put into something that they knew a great deal about. He wanted them to talk about how this topic was entwined with their own lives, how it affected them and the people around them.

And this student was talking about. Oh, she was talking about it. Dan couldn’t look away from the essay as he devoured her words. He had to restart every other paragraph to make sure he was properly comprehending it, and his hand holding the marking pen did not move beside him.

This essay, the student’s words she laid out so plainly on the paper, tugged at something deep inside of Dan. Something he hadn’t thought of since he was a child playing with his best friend, that same best friend who lived with him now.

A feeling of not belonging. Dan had recognized it in himself at such an early age, and he read it now between the lines of aching turmoil that his student had put down. This meant so much to her. Dan could understand why she had been so nervous; he would too, submitting this to a teacher he’d only known for a few weeks.

When he was finished with the paper, utterly unmarked despite his pen still dangling from the fingers of one hand, he had to take a deep breath and sit back in his chair. He could hear Phil puttering around the kitchen making their dinner, and birds chirped quietly outside as the sun dipped below the horizon.

Once he had taken his moment, he went back to the paper.

He was going to have to talk to this student tomorrow.


End file.
